21 Grams (2003)

USA, 124 minutes
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Writer: Guillermo Arriaga
Photography: Rodrigo Prieto
Music: Gustavo Santaolalla
Editor: Stephen Mirrione
Cast: Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Naomi Watts, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melissa Leo, Clea DuVall, Danny Huston, Paul Calderon

One more prestige production of the past with the prestige season of the present still (barely) upon us. 21 Grams is the kind of edgy upscale downbeat over-the-top melodrama/acting showcase that seems to put in an appearance most years one way or another, often indeed with Sean Penn in the cast—one thinks of Dead Man Walking or Mystic River, for example. Perhaps Silver Linings Playbook occupied the niche this year, though that did not seem to me generally quite as glum as many of these others, which often go to such formal narrative extremes to wring the ducts (Monster's Ball, Things We Lost in the Fire, you know what I'm talking about).

Certainly one sees similarities in terms of how 21 Grams has been put together. First and most obviously there is the big-name mainstream commercial acting talent, self-evidently "stretching": Sean Penn (who can make even running in place look like stretching), Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro—the latter two arguably at their peaks of popularity. Then there is the promising young director element, in this case Alejandro González Iñárritu, which is how I came to be gulled in. I thought his feature debut from 2000, Amores Perros, was shaggy and barely held together, but dazzled with ambition and creative energy. It seemed promising even to me to throw him in with Del Toro, Penn, and Watts, for a complicated story about lost souls in the modern world, miracles of medical science, the ways we insist on living, alienation, drugs and sex, redemption by fertility, cruel auto accidents, tortured Christianity, etc. Trauma and grief, in other words, we got 'em. Also spoilers, on the other side of the jump, big time (though here's the biggest spoiler of all: none of the narrative surprises are particularly surprising).

A

Coming first in the alphabet, the letter A is overly familiar and taken for granted, abused for its position as often as offered as a mark of excellence. Hence all the Aarons of the world who take their first rankings as a given—and why shouldn't they?—simply expecting all the A qualities of life. And by "A qualities" you know immediately that I am talking about excellence, because in the end, in many ways, that is everything that the letter A is about, or people's unseemly grasping after it. Consider the worst abuses of the letter A, which may be found still in yellow pages telephone directories, where a column or more can occur of names beginning with at least three of them, often more, e.g., AAAA House & Key. There's a reflexive state of mind for you, isn't it? Locked out of the house. Panicked. Worried. Look up a locksmith. There they are. Yes. Better get AAAA. These charlatans don't even pretend to stand for anything. I think they just add another A every generation or so. At least Alcoholics Anonymous, the Automobile Association of America, and the American Association of Retired Persons go to the fig leaf of a real name. But alas the telephone directory mentality presides as well over sporting organizations, financial instruments, even meat regulations. It's not good enough to get a Grade A cut of meat. Oh no, it has to be Grade AAA. There appears to be no such thing as B in many of these places—on the rare occasion when it does appear, as with the ponderous exercises of financial instrument ratings agencies (AAa and Bb, and all that ... speaking of charlatans), even then there is never a C. It is a tiny alphabet indeed in these worlds. And what is the meaning of all the As? Sometimes more seems to signal an increase in excellence, as with minor league baseball teams. In other cases, as with divisions in the NCAA athletic programs classifications, fewer means the same thing. Oh wait. Those are Is, a subject for another time. At any rate, you see the problem, the usual classic one of psychological inflationary forces. It's rather like deciding that "excellent," with its crashing crescendo at the back of the throat on the "ex" and the satisfying many syllables, just didn't say enough in conversation any longer, and from now on one needed to say "excellent excellent" to mean the same thing. "Excellent excellent pie, Mrs. Cleaver." It is ridiculous on its face. Thank you, grasping world of commerce. And knowing people as we do, I think it's not unlikely that by the time of the 22nd century or so people will indeed be thanking hosts for excellent excellent excellent evenings. These are just a few of the problems familiar to the letter A, which otherwise does such yeoman's work as the third most used letter in the alphabet, on which score it doesn't hurt that it's also a vowel, representing sounds made in every language.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse, "Down by the River" (1969)

(listen)

Last summer Phil asked me to take part in a poll of best Neil Young songs (results here). I was happy to comply and placed this high on my list, tied at #4 with its fellow Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere album track "Cinnamon Girl." "Cowgirl in the Sand," the third leg of that particular thematic album stool, landed slightly lower in my list, in the 20s. (In the poll, "Down by the River" was #3, "Cinnamon Girl" #6, and "Cowgirl in the Sand" #7.) "Down by the River" everybody probably knows, a simmering nine-minute sauté in which, among other things, Young takes a solo with some 30- or 40-odd repetitions of the same note. Fortunately it must be the right note, as the point usually needs to be made before people actually notice. Lord, though, in a nine-minute song of such simple, even primitive, narrative, there's ample opportunity for instrumental breaks and all manner of guitar foofaraw, and so it rolls and tumbles. That narrative, meanwhile, operates in territory of both Appalachian murder ballads and "Hey Joe," with its tragic incoherent revenge story, fragments really. "Down by the river," it basically goes, "I shot my baby." There's a little bit more to it than that, but not much. Yet out of it Neil Young and Crazy Horse (Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina) wring history somehow. It's not so surprising that it captured the late '60s mood so thoroughly it's become a Wonder Years staple of a type for evoking the time with proper visuals: shirtless freaks in top hats flashing the peace sign, etc., division of dark underside division. But it actually plays well in all circumstances, even the most latter-day such as while I am typing this, early dark with Christmas lights still visible late in the season from my window. It does seem better suited at the moment to dark and winter, I'll say that.

'50s science fiction trilogy (1951-1956)

#3: The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951) / The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953) / Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)

The rather high placement here and the trumped-up "trilogy" idea both are the result of bitterly fought negotiations on the part of me with my 11-year-old self, who threatened to blow up not just this project but all of Facebook and most of the known universe if he didn't get his way. He will tell you that he had to sacrifice separate rankings, This Island Earth, and the #1 slot, but I think I overheard him telling a reporter rather smugly that he's happy that he got 98% of everything he wanted.

I know I have my gaps here as everywhere, but sometimes it feels like science fiction is the one film genre that just keeps bringing me out, over and over again, like Charlie Brown poised to take the run and kick that football Lucy is holding for him. I seem to keep chasing it down even in the face of continual disappointment, and I am fiercely devoted to the things I like (I just rewatched the Abrams reboot of Star Trek the other night, for example, and was wowed all over again).
 

seenery

Movies/TV I saw last month...

Broadway Danny Rose (1984)—Much better than I remembered. The A story suffers from terminal slightness, as so much of the '80s Woody Allens did, but the old comics sitting around the diner telling the story somehow makes it all work (even as it could have been much better).
Capote (2005)
City Lights (1931)—Holiday favorite.
Civilisation (1969)—I am finding my first look at this BBC series to be an oddly thrilling experience. I keep wondering what this stuffed shirt Sir Kenneth Clark is doing to pull that off and I've decided that it is the way he forces us to look at the magnificence, and contemplate it with him, for all these many hours.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)—Holiday favorite.

Best American Essays 2002

For many years I was faithful to Robert Atwan's long-running Best American Essays series, which started in 1986. By the early '90s I was so enamored of the idea that I was good for the annual purchase, and it only dawned on me slowly that more often than not it was something of a chore to plow through, filled with work by a relatively small group of familiar names that recurred frequently. I finally gave it up after the 2009 edition, which seemed to me unusually deadened and of a trend long since going the wrong way. There's a case that this 2002 edition is no exception, with pieces by Atul Gawande, David Halberstam, Christopher Hitchens, Louis Menand, Gore Vidal, etc., and edited by no less a light than Stephen Jay Gould. But it remains my favorite of all of them, and only one of two I kept when I purged a roomful of books last summer to get back some living space. Much of its quality is actually the work of Gould, I think, a frequent contributor usual suspect himself in previous editions. I haven't read much of him but appreciate what I have. Not only is he a lucid, excellent writer, but his intersecting interests in science and culture provide a reliably valuable and informed point of view. In this collection he brings the clarity some more, even only in service as editor. The task he happened to be assigned in this case bore two additional burdens: sorting through the aftermath of 9/11 and dealing with a second bout of cancer, which killed him within weeks of finishing his work on this collection. One of the inherent nagging problems of the series and its chosen form is the paradox of looking for recent work while studiously striking an appropriate distance from news cycles, which is usually accomplished by ignoring most current events. This one is different. No other volume has ever been permeated so thoroughly by a single incident (or set of incidents), and it is to Gould's credit that he recognized the scope of 9/11 on the American psyche and fully engaged, adding the vital personal notes, in his introduction, that the event occurred 100 years to the day after his grandfather had arrived at Ellis Island as an immigrant, that if the towers had fallen north rather than straight down his home would have been destroyed, and incidentally that his 60th birthday had been the day before. At the same time he would not allow 9/11 to be the exclusive focus, writing, "[N]either decency nor common morality ... allow evil madmen to define history in this way." So there is also, for examples, great work from Jonathan Franzen and Barbara Ehrenreich on end-of-life calamities Alzheimer's and cancer, and a spirited and animating defense of literature from Mario Vargas Llosa—arguing that pursuit, examination, and analysis of it is not a refinement of privilege for a life that enables leisure but a crucial source of sustenance for everyone alive, very nearly a human right all unto itself. This is exactly the kind of volume I had hoped for every year back when it was habitual.

In case it's not at the library.

Get Close (1986)

What to make of this and every Pretenders album since? With a new, funkier band and with evident ongoing mellowing/maturing in evidence, it seems intended to serve an audience as much as anything. As a member of that audience I appreciated the gesture and note that it served the purpose reasonably well. In spite of tepid reviews at the time, I thought Get Close was a pretty good Pretenders album, underrated even, and allowed myself the usual infatuations, daily plays, etc. Coming back to it many years later, however, I was nonplussed to find it not quite adding up. It's clearly a drop-off point. The most obvious example is the weird shot she takes at Michael Jackson, which has become harder to brush aside as Chrissie Hynde being Chrissie Hynde, because now it seems weird in a way that helps get at some of the problems. "How Much Did You Get for Your Soul?" is your basic glass house moment, especially when you can't help noticing that it is itself pretty much a rip-off of David Bowie's "Fame" (which leads directly to the swamp of James Brown's "Hot," and oh, never mind, now it's complicated). She used to take her ire out on hypocrites and phonies. Now the target is someone who sold more albums than she ever could. And covering a Hendrix song doesn't make that OK ("Room Full of Mirrors," nonetheless a pretty good cover). After recent attempts at Get Close kept fizzling I finally remembered my favorite songs had been on the second vinyl side—"Don't Get Me Wrong" (#10 hit in November 1986), "I Remember You," and especially "Hymn for Her." Sure enough, they still sound pretty good, but not what they once were. They have grown thinner and less substantial, as if wasting away across time. Plus there is the ever more noxious "How Much Did You Get?" right in the middle of them. So maybe I stayed one album too long and at least from the vantage can wave you off this one. Fans will like it but fans already know. I will also say I have never entirely lost my appreciation for Hynde's pugnacious personality, her songwriting and singing powers, and generally her instincts, so I have checked in with most along the way—Packed!, Last of the Independents, Viva el Amor, etc., etc. There is at least one good song on each, but not much need to elaborate beyond that.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)

USA, 43 minutes
Director: Todd Haynes
Writers: Cynthia Schneider, Todd Haynes
Photography: Barry Ellsworth
Music: The Carpenters
Cast/voices: Merrill Gruver, Michael Edwards, Melissa Brown, Rob LaBelle, Nannie Doyle, Cynthia Schneider, Larry Kole, Gwen Kraus

Todd Haynes's Superstar has won a fair amount of attention in certain circles, "the Barbie doll movie about Karen Carpenter," but along the way perhaps building such an outsized reputation (because so difficult to see) that it may seem disappointing to those encountering it for the first time. It's important to understand, for purposes of setting expectations, that Superstar is low-budget, crude, unruly, often awkwardly self-conscious filmmaking with production values just north of home movies. The voiced dialogue only occasionally and intermittently reaches the level of actual performance and the whole thing is wont to slip gears with little notice between straightforward biopic, social issue documentary, and pure fan love letter, among other things. More than anything it is a display of youthful exuberance.

It is only one of many ironies that its single greatest strength, the way it fills the soundtrack with Carpenters songs, is also one of two significant reasons it will probably never see a proper public release—at least, until that material finally slips into the public domain, well beyond any of our lifetimes. The movie gains unexpected energy from many directions. Its famous use of Barbie dolls, the thoughtful way it approaches Karen Carpenter, anorexia, and food generally, and its confident sense of the popular culture zeitgeist and how the Carpenters do and do not fit. But it is the greatest pleasure to watch always when there is a Carpenters song playing.

Kraftwerk, "Computer Love" (1981)

(listen)

I've written before about how I encountered the album this comes from, Computer World, during an odd period in my life when I had no access to hi-fi gear beyond a shitty tabletop radio and one of those pre-Walkman shoebox types of cassette tape recorders. It's the only time in my adult life I have found myself in such a predicament and it only lasted six months. I was mostly doing without, which was weird enough, but a friend thought I should hear the Kraftwerk album and also Devo's New Traditionalists, which he put on the other side. I liked the Devo well enough, but Computer World is what kept bringing me back. Even at that I would not necessarily call "Computer Love" the best song on it—that would more likely be "Numbers" or "Pocket Calculator," because they also have the humor—but it's the longest, which makes me think it's the best at reproducing the experience of listening to this album, so full of such lovely, meditative, and humanizing music. Lasting more than seven minutes, and the story, such as it is, essentially a variation on the Greek story of Narcissus—so the humor is there after all, I finally see: "Could it be your face I see on my computer screen" (on the other hand, for those inclined to see in them prophets of the future, webcam interfacing decades ahead of its time)—it seems made to order for playing the way I did, in bed at night before turning in, under the covers, with the cassette recorder tucked beside one of my thighs. It was cold outside, one of the worst winters I saw in Minneapolis.

New Year memo

Happy new year to everyone. I hope you have had a good year and the best to everyone for 2013. I've had a decent year—the job creators were more kind to me than they have been in some time, which leads me to conclude, hopefully, that the economy must be improving (in spite of the best efforts of some of those same job creators to hold their breath for four years until they turn blue). Let's hope it keeps improving! We need the work! On the other hand, I also hope I can maintain or even ramp up the blog posting schedule I've been keeping most days of most weeks. Honestly, I look at the output of some of my favorite blogs, such as Antagony & Ecstasy, Lost in the Movies, or The Sheila Variations, and feel feeble in comparison. But I'm doing the best I can!

FYI, what's ahead: I am about done with countdown projects—really. Once the Facebook 50 is over, which happens this month, that's it. Next month, on Tuesdays, I will have results of a bracket-style reviewers tourney I participated in last summer. After that, I plan to revisit some of the albums I wrote about (and once made available as downloads) in the earliest incarnation of this blog, and give them more extensive write-ups, inasmuch as anything I do around here can be considered extensive. These will be favorite or "great" albums.

That earlier incarnation of this blog, by the way, the vaguely disreputable 2006-2007 mp3 blog portion you know if you have ever inspected the archives, now amounts, by my calculation, to only about 20% of the total posts, having published my 1,000th post this past month. So, with nearly 80% of the whole thing now arguably legitimate (with or without scare quotes), and because I get the sense that people don't always like people who use pseudonyms on the Internet, I have decided to make a clean break and start publishing under my real name (with or without scare quotes), which is Jeff Pike. For the record, I still like and will still probably use the alias JPK to comment in many places. Just so you know.

More faskinatin' data about this blog: In approximately May 2010, about five months after my two-year hiatus ended, Google started providing statistics on site traffic. I am reproducing the current list of this blog's top 10 most viewed pages, mostly because it is so weird. The runaway winner, better than tripling the #2, is a review of a horror movie that mentions the name of a starlet. Similarly, I'm convinced the Dolly Parton song does so well because I had the wisdom to include the word "boob" in the write-up. Anyway, here, for your edification, delight, and conjectures about the obvious, are my best-known pages (with total pageviews as of Dec. 31, 2012, in parentheses).
1. The Ring (2002), Oct. 1, 2010 (18,083)
2. 21. Eminem, "Kim" (2000), Nov. 23, 2011 (5,955)
3. 32. Dolly Parton, "Down From Dover" (1970), Nov. 2, 2011 (4,918)
4. "Billie Jean" (1983), Jan. 17, 2011 (4,874)
5. The Godfather: Part II (1974), April 1, 2011 (4,493)
6. Led Zeppelin IV (1971), Sept. 10, 2011 (2,895)
7. Led Zeppelin II (1969), Sept. 3, 2011 (2,454)
8. Ghost World (2001), June 4, 2010 (2,436)
9. 18. Bruce Springsteen, "The River" (1980), Nov. 29, 2011 (2,190)
10. 77. Brian Eno, "Third Uncle" (1974), June 6, 2011 (2,043)

But all that is the past. As for the future, I have plans, I have plans: Fridays to continue on movies, Saturdays on albums, Sundays on books, Wednesdays on songs—all, as ever, as stamina allows. Mondays I have been trying to catch up with new(er) albums and movies, including a monthly rundown post on movies and TV I've been watching, and I plan to keep that up. On Thursdays, a project that honors the numbers 13, 26, and 52 with a consideration of the letters of the alphabet. And, later in the year, I am thinking of series more focused on filmmakers or other categories of movies, probably starting with Robert Altman. Other possibilities on my short list include Joe Dante and Gregory La Cava.

Last, I am going to take my sweet time this year with the year-end assessments in movies for 2012. So look for that down the line, probably March time frame. In the meanwhile I can share the following critical lists for you—
Favorite movies first seen in 2012: The Apu Trilogy; Days and Nights in the Forest; The Double Life of Veronique; The Fast Runner; The Hurt Locker; The Lord of the Rings; M. Hulot's Holiday; Paris, Texas; A Scene at the Sea; Wendy and Lucy
Favorite movies seen again in 2012: Alien, Broadway Danny Rose, Enter the Void, Goodfellas, In the Mood for Love, Mulholland Dr., Pontypool, The Triplets of Belleville, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Yi Yi

Also, right, your own responsibilities in this overarching blog project. Please leave a comment once in a while. I appreciate knowing people have been here and read things and had a thought. I am notified of every comment, even on the oldest posts, so no one is ever lost in any shuffle. Comments absolutely tend to make my day, even the critical or challenging ones. So pretty please, with sugar on top, do what you have to to overcome the inertia now and then. You'll feel better, I'll feel better, we'll all feel better. OK, out. Thank you for your comments, visits, presence. Hope you all have a great year, from JEFF PIKE.